Keywords

Language as a Play of Differences

Among the metaphors applied most often in the social sciences and humanities to explicate language is an analogy of games, associated with analytical philosophers such as Wittgenstein. Portrayed via this imagery, language resembles playing a game. In his example of a make-believe builder’s language, words such as ‘blocks’, ‘pillars’, ‘slabs’, and ‘beams’ are the names of the objects. In Wittgenstein’s language-game, or Sprachspiel, a builder teaches an assistant a name related to an object to enable fetching an object that corresponds to the master’s call. The language-game has a material aspect in the form of ‘building blocks’ that are not merely linguistic phenomena. In other words, the materiality of objects is a decisive part of the language-game that discourse theorists call a discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985/2001, 108). Discourse builds regularity in a dispersion of its constitutive elements, according to discourse analysts, who stress the practices of language use in a manner similar to that of speech-act theorists. In addition, they consider non-discursive practices, activities outside language. Such a way of thinking about language’s use as a discursive practice diverges from regarding language as a system of differences consisting of signs—i.e., from the approach employed in structural linguistics.

An analogy with games explicates words, along with their usage and meaning, by—via metaphor—comparing them to and contrasting them against other things, such as playing a game of chess. From the structuralist standpoint, the matter of the usage of words and their meaning in language is an external issue ‘while everything having to do with its system and rules’ (Harris 1988, 22) is an internal matter in structuralist terms. Therefore, if ho** to explain the meaning of a word, as in the history of ideas, one must also make sense of the language that sets rules for its various uses. Hence, language is like a game in the sense that both are ‘self-contained’ (p. 24). In a game of chess, it is not the chess piece as such that matters but its differential function (i.e., value) in relation to other pieces, which confers its distinctive character on the chessboard (Saussure 1916/1959, 110). In a similar manner, a word derives its meaning in contrast against other terms used systematically in language because of conventional rules. Language is unlike chess, however, in that it changes its rules historically in accordance with individual moves that can have contingent and unexpected consequences for the elements of this whole system (see pp. 88–89).

Structural linguistics is now a discipline largely consigned to history, but it was fashionable half a century ago. For instance, in his Elements of General Linguistics, André Martinet describes language as ‘a double articulated system’ (1964/1966, 24–29). In his outline of spoken language and its semiotic code structure, the first articulation takes place in a commonly shared plane of communication wherein each of the distinctive units (i.e., signs) is articulated out of the signifier and the signified. This first articulation takes place at a level where the smallest meaningful units are ‘morphemes’. The second articulation arises at the phonological level, that of ‘phonemes’, which consist of speech sounds that are conceived of as signifying elements that lack meaning in their right. The latter articulation means the spoken expression of the distinctive units in speech. Through this double articulation, it becomes possible to enunciate utterances from a pool of a limited set of sounds to express potentially unlimited meanings on account of the phonological elements (such as syllables and sounds) that function as the distinctive units of language. Because of the double articulation, linguistic units can combine or displace in relation to one another, while the structure of language acts as a mechanism that sets rules for the interplay. The rule of double articulation defines language as a structure wherein meaningful units articulate out of distinctive elements and meaning takes its place in relation to all other elements in the semiotic system. The resulting spoken language comprises a limited quantity of speech sounds that articulate into an infinite quantity of meaningful units—words constituting sentences, paragraphs, chapters of a book, etc.

Saussure gave his lectures at the University of Geneva in Switzerland over a century ago. From those lectures, his colleagues and students compiled the posthumous Course in General Linguistics (Saussure 1916/1959), which expresses an analytical distinction between the signified (or concept) and the signifier (or sound-image). Although the two stand in an arbitrary relation, the relationship, when articulated into a sign, becomes conventional, albeit not natural. While the relation between a sound image and a concept is arbitrary, it is at the same time conventional because language is a social institution that one must learn before one can speak. Saussure refers to the link that produces the sign as ‘signification’ (cf. ‘meaning’), and the sign is a basic unit of language, wherein an image of a sound refers to an idea as if the pair were ‘two sides of a sheet of paper’ (pp. 112–113). Importantly, the sign is only a link between the ideas and the sound images in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Saussure draws a parallel here between the way in which an air current causes the surface of water to ripple and how thoughts articulate with the phonic substance.

For Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, language appears in what he denoted as ‘the domain of articulations’ (p. 112). In phonetics, articulation provides the means of speech, for example, in the pronunciation of consonants as described earlier in this work (air moves freely through the vocal tract until it is obstructed by the vocal organs and a sound is hence produced). Saussure, however, saw the sound as ‘only the instrument of thought’ conceived of as an image wherein a ‘complex acoustical-vocal unit’ articulates to an idea (p. 8). For distinctive units to be structured out of a ‘shapeless and indistinct mass’, articulation gives form to these units by uttering them aloud. The thrust of his argument is that a ‘linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea’ (pp. 111–113). Articulation operates like a joint or member between the amorphous thoughts and sounds that form distinct signs. In the above extract from Course in General Linguistics, Saussure defines articulation by means of an anatomical term, the Latin one for a joint (i.e., articulus); He gave this word itself a definition (on p. 10), as

a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence; applied to speech, articulation designates either the subdivision of a spoken chain into syllables [the first definition] or the subdivision of the chain of meanings into significant units; gegliederte Sprache [‘articulated speech’, or ‘articulated language’ for Derrida (1967/1997)] is used in the second sense in German. Using the second definition, we can say that what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas.

Structuralist thinking adopted the latter definition of articulation, with language articulating ‘a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas. I assume that the reason for referring to the gegliederte Sprache in this connection as an alternative to an anatomy-bound notion of articulation is to delineate a distinction against the more linguistically oriented definition involving an articulus (i.e., a linguistic part or member of a chain cut into syllables and sounds through speech). In the second sense, in contrast, speech (or language) forms a distinctive unit (i.e., a sign) out of ‘the floating realm’ (p. 112) of thoughts and sounds by means of articulation that takes shape in language by cutting both of its sides—the expression and content—at the same time, as in the ‘sheet of paper’ simile. Saussure carries this idea further (pp. 120–122): ‘In language […] whatever distinguishes one sign from the others constitutes it’, and the sign is a product of articulation that is ‘a positive fact’ having ‘a substance’. Meanwhile, its ‘individual members’ not yet articulated are only ‘differential and negative’; hence, they do not exist outside the system of differences that is language. Saussure paid close attention to the abstract rules and conventions of language as a socially instituted system of differences that relationally determines the value of each sign. In this respect, the referent is detached from anything that goes beyond language as a closed system of differences.

Saussure’s synchronic approach to language marked a departure from diachronic linguistics, which concerned itself with the origins of language and its development. It was not until the late 1930s, however, that linguist Louis Hjelmslev branded Saussure’s work ‘structural linguistics’ (Dosse 1991/1997, xxii), regardless of the word ‘structure’ having appeared only a couple of times in his Course. Moreover, Hjelmslev’s colleague Roman Jakobson developed Saussure’s ideas within the Prague Circle in linguistics as a general science of language that forms what Saussure had called a self-contained whole and a classification principle. In 1956, Jakobson, who worked with Hjelmslev and then with Lévi-Strauss, published an article on language and language disorders. In it, Jakobson distinguishes between the ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ axes of language, building on Saussure’s synchronic approach. Saussure considered symbolic systems to have two axes: The paradigmatic axis has to do with the ‘vertical’ part of the system of signs, which allows selection of one element such as a word and its substitution with another (in associative relations). This is the metaphorical aspect.

The syntagmatic axis, in turn, addresses the metonymic aspect, which entails a combination of elements with reference to contiguity, forming ‘horizontal’ relations such as words articulated into sentences. Syntagmatic relations hold while language is present, linking distinctive elements into meaningful wholes. Paradigmatic relations hold only in the absence of language as a system of differences that allows a selection of distinctive elements and their substitution with others. Jakobson (1956) was able to carry his thinking into practice, distinguishing between two types of aphasia with reference to the phonological model: In a contiguity disorder, aphasic entails the absence of the capacity to keep up discussion in units longer than a few words, which is associated with metonymy and a deficiency in forming sentences. In a similarity disorder, in contrast, the aphasic is incapable of choosing between individual words. This leaves the patient with a considerably restricted vocabulary, which is linked to the metaphorical aspect of language as a symbolic order.

Jakobson’s study of language disorders influenced Lacan’s application of the linguistic paradigm in his structuralist reading of Freud. Lacan adopted the notions of metaphor and metonymy from Jakobson as a condensation and displacement of meaning with respect to Freud’s classic The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1913). In his return to Freud, Lacan put the structuralist and linguistic paradigm into action with this claim: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’ According to Freudian psychoanalysts, when one considers unconsciousness to stem from a structure such as language, slips of the tongue, for instance, unintentionally give away meanings to the signifying elements of the unconscious not organised by the ego. Rather than statements that articulate by way of conscious speech, the psychoanalyst attends to unconscious enunciations by the subject as an object of analytical attention. Lacan adopted Saussure’s notion of language as a system of differences that consists not of signs but of signifiers. Only signifiers can produce a signified. Because of this, Lacan argued that the signifier is prior to the signified, which only slides beneath it. This represents a contrast against the stance of Saussure, for whom expression and content were like the two sides of a sheet of paper. In place of the sign fixing the relation between the signifier and the signified, there is a barrier that resists all signification.

Crossing that barrier is possible only because of the metaphors that substitute one signifier for another on the paradigmatic axis of language. The syntagmatic axis, in turn, is associated with metonymy in its combination of signifiers to form the ‘signifying chain’. The ‘network of the signifier’ has the ‘synchronic structure of language’ (Lacan 1966/2006, 414), but the signifying chain must be punctuated if meanings are to be produced. This is because of the barrier, a ‘bar’ (barre) between a signifier and the signified, which resists signification but allows a combination or articulation of the signifiers and their displacement. In this process of articulation, the ‘quilting point’, ‘anchoring point’, or ‘nodal point’ (point de capiton) acts as a ‘button tie’ stitching up the sliding of the signifier temporally. The elements that stop the endless sliding of the signifiers are the nodal points, where quilting or anchoring temporarily prevents the signifiers from floating. Their movement halts here. If the sliding of the signifiers does not stop at a quilting point, the subject will not submit to the symbolic order. Failure to become the subject of the symbolic order leads to psychosis, with certain language disorders being symptomatic of this. When submitting to the symbolic function of culture, the subject splits but does not fragment into pieces. In substitution for unrestricted pleasure (jouissance) and the torments of passion, lawful and neurotic subjects search for pleasure via culturally and socially sanctioned ways of realising the objects of desire.

Post-Structuralist Deconstruction of the Linguistic Paradigm

The structuralist paradigm rose dominant, reached its peak, and was reshaped into post-structuralist critique within a rather short span of time.Footnote 1 Instead of the irony of opposites in social sciences, wherein the structures and actors stand for each other dialectically, the linguistic trope for structuralism was the metaphor in itself. In the broadest sense, the structuralists’ metaphor extends to any system of meanings—for instance, marriage rules and systems of kinship. Historically, structuralism followed phenomenology, criticising approaches that build on action theory’s way of interpreting subjective meanings, which focused on the individuals and understanding of their subjective ‘life-world’. At the same time, however, many French intellectuals such as Althusser did not want to identify with structuralism and rejected the label.

After World War II, the leading intellectual in France was Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom ‘existence precedes essence’ in a form of becoming. By advancing existentialism toward understanding of the human mind, phenomenology inspired a new generation of young philosophers. The father figure for most structuralists, however, was not Sartre but an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss, and a phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who saw the social world as made of symbols and signs (see Brown 1987, 101; see also Dosse 1991/1997, 23). Lévi-Strauss, whom French intellectuals consider the leading academic behind structuralism, published his breakthrough work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, in 1949.Footnote 2 In it, he claims that the basic kinship structures order marriage rules in a manner paralleling language by prohibiting some relations while stipulating others. A key foundation for the social order is the ‘incest taboo’, which he asserted is universal. It subsumes the natural order with the order of culture. On the one hand, it strengthens the relationships among the members of the system because of their exchange. In this respect, the prohibition of incest not only forbids some marriages based on bloodline but also produces a social order in terms of culture. On the other hand, marital relations are arbitrary and conventional, similar to language (Lévi-Strauss 1949/1969; Dosse 1991/1997, 19–30). The idea of a law that underpins all social relations and governs all forms of social exchange in the manner of language swept like a virus across diverse fields of study.

For the structuralist generation of social scientists, language was similar to the collective conscience conceived of by Saussure’s contemporary Durkheim, which binds people together in society. Both Durkheim and Saussure built their theories on the symbolic structures and systems of signs, and they employed similar vocabulary. However, Saussure never cited Durkheim. There is no proof of him even having been aware of Durkheim’s work (Alexander 1988, 4–5; Heiskala 2003, 182). Instead of Durkheimian sociology, Saussure articulated semiology (1916/1959, 16, 121), ‘a science that studies the life of signs within society’. A key aspect of it is that once a sign articulates with another sign, the ‘two signs, each having a signified and signifier, are not different but only distinct’ from one another. In this manner, signs gain their meanings socially in relation to each other. Language, in turn, consists of the abstract rules and codes that govern the articulation of signifying elements into meaningful units at the grammatical level. In other words, the structure of language is prior to any expression or utterance.

The studies of literary theorist Roland Barthes extended structural linguistics further. He turned it into a sort of semiology that serves fields other than phonology. While Saussure had anticipated such progression in his Course, semiology as developed by Barthes did something more. He offered a theoretical model for analyses of denotation, connotation, and myths, which linguists had excluded from their approach. For his Mythologies, Barthes (1957/1972) deciphered the myths of the ‘petit bourgeois’ ideology by applying semiology, including advertisements and the world of entertainment, in his consideration. Barthes’s poetic style and theoretical writings on French popular culture made him one of the most prominent intellectuals of the structuralist movement in the 1960s.

That decade was the beginning of the shift from linguistics and structuralist semiotics to the sprouting discourse theory from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Lacan established his own school of psychoanalysis, represented by his seminars, where he taught the French elite, who were not enmired in the disputes within Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist philosophy.Footnote 3 For one of the seminars, on the ‘reverse of psychoanalysis’, in 1969–1970, he addressed the issue of the problems wrought by the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis in higher education. Lacan’s lectures on the subject delved into the four discourses that unfold a particular structural relationship, the master-signifier’s relation to all other signifiers and its relation to the ‘split subject’ that arises from the relationship wherein the master-signifier represents the subject in relation to all other signifiers in the field of knowledge. An excess product in this process is a surplus that is ‘the object-cause of desire’, which is born out of lack of enjoyment. This leftover prevents the master-signifier—which may be any signifier representing the subject—from completely taking over the subject.

As the foregoing description hints, Lacan held in his theory that the model for all discourses is ‘the discourse of the master’. This discourse is grounded in the dialectic between master and slave. In it, the master strives to appropriate knowledge from the slave like capitalists make effort to appropriate the surplus value from labour. In the second of the four discourses, ‘the discourse of the university’, the master-signifier holds what he called the position of truth; here, knowledge occupies the dominant position for control of the truth. In the position of the other lies the object-cause of desire of the split subject for purposes of knowing, even when the master does not hold a dominant position. This type of discourse is a modern form of the discourse of the master, wherein the master-signifier takes over knowledge from its subjects in an abstract and theoretical form that renders it displaceable. Lacan’s own discourse theory falls into this bucket. In his lectures to students and the radicals of Vincennes, Lacan expressed expectations that revolutionary struggle and hysterical questioning would ultimately lead only to a new master, who would put the subjects in the position of the slave. The reverse is psychoanalysis. In ‘the discourse of the hysteric’, the split subject obtains a dominant position. It wishes the master to produce knowledge as the truth of its object-cause of desire, which is missing. That is the starting point for the final discourse, ‘the discourse of the analyst’. In this context, the analyst must turn into an object-cause of desire of the split subject. Knowledge can become the truth of the split subject, subverting mastery and dominance as ‘the cure’ in practice. The aim in psychoanalysis is, in other words, to bring back enjoyment to the subject via analysis of the symptom (for discussion, see Evans 1996, 45–47; see also Kurki 2012, 64–90).

By the time of his death, in 1980, Lacan had amassed transcripts for 27 seminars (which an admirer and relative by marriage, Jacques-Alain Miller, has been compiling retrospectively into books based on the lectures). He had accumulated a set of critics too, with many of his colleagues challenging Lacan’s teachings, among them Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983; 1980/1987) in their two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia. To their post-structural way of thinking, desire is a productive force, not a lack of subject. In addition, they contested Marxists’ precept by which class struggle is a motor of social change. The entire legacy of Lacanian psychoanalysis is still controversial, and most social theorists do not admit his work to the canon of the social sciences and humanities (cf. Foucault, whose discourse theory gained nearly undisputed regard as a sociological classic). A cautionary example of the confusing and multitudinous contradictory uses of the term ‘discourse’ is, however, visible especially in the post-structuralist debates. Because of these, Foucault has been accused of overly broad use of the concept, although many of these accusations lack a reference point in his actual work and stem from false assumptions and misreading as pointed in above (Sawyer 2002, 434–435).

One contemporary of Lacan in French post-structuralism was Derrida. A deconstructive philosopher who criticised both Saussure’s linguistics and distant predecessors such as Rousseau with his ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’ (1781/1966), Derrida, argued that those authors saw only ‘two distinct systems of signs; the second [writing] exists for the sole purpose of representing the first [speech]’ (Derrida 1967/1997, 30). Accordingly, he established a distinction from the structuralist tradition with his notion of différance (note that the standard form of the French word uses an ‘e’ rather than an ‘a’), which refers to a difference that one can only see, not hear. Because this neologism itself can be distinguished from the popular French word only in written language, it is an effective tool in deconstructing the phonological claims of the superiority of speech. In terms of Rousseau’s myth of the origins of language, language without a difference is a collection of inarticulate sounds and unintelligible gestures. Articulated speech, in turn, inaugurated a difference from this state of nature as a symbolic order. In Derrida’s treatment, the play of differences forms an unbounded space for the articulations ‘by means of which elements are related to each other’ infinitely. For Derrida, nothing precedes the play of differences, and no subject has power over the articulations.

Derrida deconstructed various metaphysical and speculative notions in his books Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference, all published in 1967. As a substitute for deciphering the codes and myths with reference to semiology as Barthes did, Derrida applied philosophical treatments from phenomenology, especially from its German tradition, according to which philosophy builds on metaphysics. He scrutinised metaphysics in reference to ‘deconstruction’, which is ‘both destruction and construction’ (see Dosse 1992/1997, 17–41). Derrida deconstructed, for example, the opposition set up between writing and speaking, wherein speech seems to be a natural form of language while writing is only its artificial trace. In ‘logocentrism’, a specific form of which is the ‘phonocentrism’ evident in the abovementioned phonological claims, speech is superior to writing. Speech builds on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and writing ruptures it with respect to ‘archi-writing’, which is a condition for the systematic play of differences. Applied in this connection, ‘différance’ is a catchword associated with the verbs ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. Under this notion, each element exists in relation to others, from which it differs, and the definition of meaning is deferred through the endless chain of signification (Derrida 1972/1981; see also Ryan 1982, 11–12). From this standpoint, no meaning or origin external to the continuous differing and deferring exists; there are only ghostlike traces of being that deconstruction can expose.

Articulation of Nodal Points as a Discursive Practice

Post-Marxist political theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe, their students in the Essex school, and the still active philosopher Slavoj Žižek, among others, have developed discourse theory toward more of a political philosophy, where a new social logic had been in order for the New Left. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe cite hegemony as the most important discourse-theoretical category for political analysis. They clarify that this involves articulation of the above-mentioned ‘nodal points’ or ‘master-signifiers’, terms that refer to a ‘particular element assuming a “universal” structuring function within a certain discursive field’ (1985/2001, xi). The condition of hegemony entails the discursive elements articulating in practice, not because of any inherent relationships to each other through certain internal laws. Their model implies a lack of totality—the unity of discursive elements is constructed socially and politically in contingent terms. Post-Marxists position this as ‘anti-essentialism’ running counter to the Althusserian approach with its universalistic inclination.

Regarding ‘radical democracy’, Laclau and Mouffe committed in both theory and practice to the contingency of all social relations that are open to a hegemonic struggle in such a manner that they claimed no relationship to have priority over others. At the core of radical-democratic politics is the notion of contingency and the idea that identity is not fixed outside the discursive field of articulation. Laclau contributed especially to the ontology of discourse theory, while his spouse Mouffe additionally made a political call for ‘agonistic pluralism’ criticising ‘deliberative democracy’ (with reference to the latter as found in the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, see Selg 2011, 169–172; Laclau 1996; Mouffe 1999). For Mouffe, this entailed challenging liberal-democratic models inscribed in theory that are regarded by many people as indifferent, descriptive, and apolitical. In the politics of deliberative democracy, the discussion builds on liberal-democratic values such as freedom of speech, which many consider a universal ideal. Agonistic pluralism, on the other hand, also recognises the adversaries of these, confronting them for what they are. Said adversaries have a right to defend their position, which implies consent built in hegemonic struggles.

Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001, 113) argued that a prerequisite to a struggle for hegemony is the expansion of a political space filled with floating signifiers that are not yet fully formed and instead are partially fixed. According to Laclau (2005, 116, 226), ‘[t]he logic of the objet petit a [i.e., surplus desire/meaning in Lacanian psychoanalysis] and the hegemonic logic [in Marxist philosophy of praxis] are not just similar: they are simply identical’. A signifier acquires different meanings in different contexts and articulates signifying chains through a nodal point (Lacan’s point de capiton, or master-signifier) that structures an open discursive field of action. This opens a discursive space for ideological and political struggles for hegemony over elements that are not essential but overdetermined by one another. In contradiction with a self-contained and fully articulated system of differences as seen in Saussure’s notion of language or Marx’s conception of social structure as an articulated whole such as Gliederung, social relations are now conceived of as contingent articulations in a discursive field, which leads to the struggle for hegemony wherein ‘radical democratic’ politics and action take place.

By means of the practice of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe explained, the constituent elements of a discourse organise in such a way that their relative identity changes. Such an articulated entity is not, therefore, a fully structured discursive totality akin to a machine or an organism, whose parts are in a necessary relation with one another and determined by this structured whole. Articulations take place instead because of dislocation of its elements to fix the meaning of the signifiers that float freely in a discursive field. In this sense, articulation is a discursive practice that ‘consists in the construction of nodal points’ around which the signifying elements are temporarily organised or fixed as discursive moments. According to Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001, 113),

the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.

In the field of discursivity, this contingency is governed by the logics of equivalence and difference, which stand in constant relationship with one another. From this point of view, the ‘chains of equivalence’ (see p. 170) articulate around discursive subject positions to produce a group identity out of differences in opposition to ‘the other’, as in the case of the working class versus capitalists, while antagonisms resist this symbolisation (the ‘real’ contradictions conceived in the relations of production, for instance). The logic of difference is applied to resolve this split in aims of disseminating the various antagonisms in a relatively open discursive field for the struggle over hegemony. Hence, no social formation is a fully sutured and self-confined whole because of the surplus (or objet petit a), which is due to an excess that subverts the fixed meanings (p. 113).

Radical democracy is grounded in an assumption of ‘the contingency and ambiguity of every “essence”’ of the social (p. 193). In a complex social formation replete with contradictions, the overdetermination of all social relations (in other words, the overflow of its discursive fields) implies that society has no existence other than as a necessary limit to arbitrariness. Antagonisms arise from this failure to achieve a sutured whole based on lack seen at the core of all social identity. In this respect, ‘the presence of some objects in the others prevents any of their identities from being fixed’ (p. 104). This definition delimits fully constituted systems of difference such as language by illuminating their borders as a symbolic order. Consequently, we find antagonisms or the negativity at the core of the social and the constitutive struggles for hegemony. Accordingly, the political appears as a discursive field based on social and political action as the contingent articulations of social relations employed to constitute the people against the hegemonic power bloc. The demands for democracy extend in this manner in the new domains of struggle as the above-mentioned radical-democratic politics.

According to Laclau (2006, 103–104), Marxists conceptualise the contradictions and struggle as taking place in objective social relations whereas antagonisms set the discursive limits to the objectivity itself. This stance does not permit any object to carve its own identity. Rather, an identity is created through the empty signifiers that name the objects of a discourse retroactively, thereby setting up the reference point after the act of signification. For purposes of this discussion, the empty signifier is a nodal point—that is, a ‘signifier without the signified’ (see Laclau 1996, 36; see also Žižek 1989/2008, 109). As the nodal point, a signifier is emptied of its meaning for the project of articulating other signifiers to symbolise the absent identity (Stavrakakis 1999, 80). In ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’, Laclau (1996, 44) offers an example of an empty signifier through Hobbes’s state of nature:

[I]n a situation of radical disorder ‘order’ is present as that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this filling function.

In early modern political thought, people acknowledged the rule of an absolute sovereign as a legitimate order of society for the simple reason that it seemed the only alternative to inevitable disorder (p. 45). As for new social movements, the aims behind the struggle for hegemony are not always so clear but still signify resisting the system in its present state (p. 41). To construct a nodal point of an ideological discourse in a manner that fills the gap with whatever appears as its closure implies taking it as if it were real. This calls for political articulation as an alternative to following every rule to the letter.

Regarding contingency, every identity seems relative, and it enables articulatory practices by discursive means. Discourse is made up of divergent positions, moments where its constituent elements have a relative identity. ‘Articulation’ is any practice that forms a relationship between two or more elements such that a change in their identity emerges. One consequence of this structuring practice is a discourse. However, such an entity is never unified, never a self-contained whole. Hence, social structure defined as a structured totality is impossible (p. 114). Taking the place of such a whole is an open discursive field where overdetermination complicates forming of identities and its elements never fully articulate to the signifying chains. Since all identities are relative, no articulation of the constitutive elements to discursive moments is ever complete. The practice of articulation, therefore, consists of the construction of nodal points that temporarily fix floating signifiers to quilt their identity in such a way that the identity of their constitutive elements changes (Laclau and Mouffe 1985/2001, 113).

Every attempt of closure quilting the identities is therefore doomed to fail because identity forms relationally—that is, in relation to all other elements in the discourse. Writing in Emancipation(s) (1996), Laclau discusses empty signifiers as referred to above. Since becoming an empty signifier entails a signifier getting emptied of its meaning, every signifier that refers to other signifiers can become a master-signifier: ‘a signifier without a signified’. Žižek (2000, 108) took a lesson from Laclau and Mouffe in this regard—to conceive of the political with reference to the hegemonic struggles—but went on to criticise the normative appeals favouring a liberal-democratic state, characterising them as ‘the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime’. For post-Marxism, it follows from the overdetermined social relations in the symbolic order that hegemony comes about in an open discursive field of action where the political is an empty space of the discursive elements not articulating into structured totalities.

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989/2008), Žižek calls the object of ideology a ‘rigid designator’. For him, it acts as a nodal point around which the identity of the ideological elements is temporarily fixed, supporting signifying chains. In his psychoanalytical reading, ideology supports the identity after a traumatic encounter with the real—i.e., with antagonisms, which resist symbolisation by revealing the limits of the symbolic. In this respect, antagonism overlaps with Lacan’s notion of ‘the Real’ that resists signification. For both, a process of signification always encompasses an unattainable object-cause of desire remaining as a residue or leftover. The objet petit a is crucial because it gives consistency to the split subject.

In radical-democratic politics, several social and political positions relate metonymically with one another around certain nodal points that discursively articulate ideological elements. Its opposite is totalitarian politics. Fascism builds ideologically on, for example, anti-Semitism, wherein ideological elements condense metaphorically in the figure of ‘the Jew’. This is illustrated well by national socialist ideology’s literal division of the political into two opposing camps. Consequently, the identity of mutually distinct elements was reduced to equivalences, where each difference became displaceable by the others, such that the definition came in purely negative terms. ‘Jew’ reappeared for fascists as the excrement of a rotting social body that remained intact only in a paranoid conspiracy theory that led to very real mass destruction (see Laclau 1996, 36–46; Laclau and Mouffe 1985/2001, 130; Žižek, 1989/2008, 95–144; see also Stavrakakis 1999, 76).

Grossberg (1992, 54) states the following in his cultural theory:

Articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices […]. Articulation is the construction of one set of relations out of another […]. Articulation is a continuous struggle to reposition practices within a shifting field of forces, to redefine the possibilities of life by redefining the field of relations—the context—within which a practice is located […]. Articulation is both the practice of history and its critical reconstruction, displacement and renewal.

In stitching up distinctive identities, fragments, and structures from bits and pieces, there are no necessary correspondences in their articulation to a particular position or to a particular set of experiences, as the above example attests. In fact, it appears that, in principle, anything articulates with anything else. This gives the concept of articulation a potentially limitless range of reference. For various connections to be made and remade in practice, some links are broken, creating room for the creation of new ones. Thus, follows a field of action that goes beyond the economic to the prevailing conjunctures in which practices are located and changed. The process also includes actors who are active in contexts that create the circumstances in which people live and where social change can take place.

In work building on the discourse-theory approach, Grossberg (pp. 52–61) describes the lines and breaks between practices and their effects as most real: one finds a practice manifested not where it is used but at the site of its effects. Hence, the relations and connections are contingent and made repeatedly. This approach is called radical contextualism because of its commitments to ‘relationality’ and ‘contextuality’, which are considered necessary for understanding ‘what is going on’ in contemporary conjunctures. This relational or contextual approach is embodied in the concept of articulation, which characterises ‘the analytic practice of cultural studies’ (Grossberg 2010, 21). It is, in fact, one of the central concepts for cultural studies, where it acts as ‘a sign of avoiding reduction’ (Slack 1996, 118). Cultural-studies scholars have engaged in reflexive reassessment of ‘the theory of articulation’, from which the concept has reached new audiences.

Conclusion

Structural linguistics proffered ‘articulation’ as an anatomically oriented metaphor covering the linguistic parts of language. These link formless thoughts and sounds to form distinctive signs via language, which forms a system of differences. The ‘social action is language’ conceptual metaphor is built on the paradigm of structuralism, which became fashionable in the social sciences with the resurgence of structural linguistics ushered in by social anthropology. For French structuralism, as in structural linguistics, language is a system of differences. Rather than following a linear representation of time, language is synchronic, so history became ‘a process without a subject’. One problem found in this approach is its universalistic notion of the subject. Structuralists’ anti-humanism was an attempt to eliminate this issue but ended up highlighting it instead. At the base, such notions do not account for actors’ subjective meanings. Structuralists’ failure to develop an alternative to phenomenology for coming to terms with the transcendental subject invited post-structuralist critique.

The post-structuralist approach, then, cast aside language as a system of differences, in favour of emphasis on a play of differences wherein the signifiers are unable to fix meanings or to anchor the identity of the subject that is split between the conscious statements and the unconscious enunciations, which resist symbolisation. With post-Marxist discourse theory, the concept of articulation demonstrated its power by opening a discursive space for ideological struggles that quilt the signifying chains in practice. A space opened, in turn, for examining political articulation as negation of the social structure wherein the economic defines political objectives or the hegemonic task of a given social group. This contemporary usage has its roots in the Essex school, which approached social relations as a product of articulations at the political level. For discourse theorists and cultural analysts of that orientation, the ideological and political are structured similarly to a language or culture, which are epiphenomenal in relation to the action of individuals, and society is subordinate to the actors who constitute it. The core problem in this approach is that it consigns the ‘social structure is an articulated whole’ metaphor to the dustbin of history, from which any return to Marx becomes difficult. With the discursive turn, in this respect, one turns one’s back on the social structure as an articulated whole, a concept well worth kee** if one is to avoid reduction wherein society turns into a language-game or a non-hierarchical actor network.